Dark Angel Read Online Free Page B

merciful speed. Wexton said Steenie willed himself away, and I thought: my uncle was indomitable, I loved him, and Wexton was right.
    So—would you describe that as easy? I looked at Vickers, then avoided his eyes. I felt that Steenie, trying to stage-manage his farewell performance, would have wanted me to emphasize its bravura aspects.
    Avoid those episodes in the wings. Be careful.
    “He … kept up appearances,” I said.
    This seemed to please Vickers, or to relieve his guilt. He sighed.
    “Oh, good. ”
    “He was in bed, of course. In his room at Winterscombe. You remember that room….”
    “Dah-ling, who could forget it? Quite preposterous. His father would have had a fit.”
    “He wore his silk pajamas. Lavender ones, on the days the doctors came—you know how he liked to shock—”
    Vickers smiled. “Makeup? Don’t tell me he kept up with that …”
    “Just a little. Quite discreet, for Steenie. He said … he said if he was going to shake hands with death, he intended to look his best—”
    “Don’t be upset. Steenie would have hated you to be upset.” Vickers sounded almost kind. “Tell me—it does help to talk, you know. I’ve learned that. One of the penalties of age: All one’s friends—at the party one minute, absent the next. Steenie and I were the same age, you know. Sixty-eight. Not that that’s old exactly, these days. Still …” He paused. “Did he talk about me at all, at the end?”
    “A bit,” I replied, deciding to forgive him the egotism. In fact Steenie had scarcely spoken of Vickers. I hesitated. “He liked to talk. He drank the Bollinger—I’d saved some. He smoked those terrible black Russian cigarettes. He read poems—”
    “Wexton’s poems?” Vickers had regarded Wexton as a rival. He made a face.
    “Mostly Wexton’s. And his letters—old ones, the ones he wrote to Steenie in the first war. All the old photograph albums … It was odd. The recent past didn’t interest him at all. He wanted to go further back. To his childhood, to Winterscombe the way it used to be. He talked a lot about my grandparents, and his brothers. My father, of course.” I paused. “And Constance.”
    “Ah, Constance. I suppose he would. Steenie always adored her. The rest of your family”—Vickers gave a small, slightly malicious smile—“I should have said they weren’t too frightfully keen. Your aunt Maud loathed her, of course, and your mother—well, I always heard she’d more or less banished her from Winterscombe. I never found out why. Quite a little mystery there, I always thought. Did Steenie mention that?”
    “No,” I replied, untruthfully, and if Vickers noticed the evasion he gave no sign. He poured more champagne. Something, the reference to Wexton perhaps, had ruffled him a little, I thought. Quite suddenly he seemed to tire of the subject of my uncle. He stood up and began to sift through the pile of photographs that lay on the table at his side.
    “Speaking of Constance, look at this! I came across it just the other day. I’d quite forgotten I ever took it. My earliest work. The first photograph I ever did of her—terribly posed, too artificial, dated, I suppose, but all the same, I might use it in the retrospective. It has something, don’t you think?” He held up a large black-and-white print. “Nineteen sixteen—which means I was sixteen, and so was Constance, though she subtracts the years now, of course. Look at this. Did you ever see this before? Doesn’t she look extraordinary?”
    I looked at the photograph. It was new to me, and Constance did indeed look extraordinary. It was, as Vickers said, highly artificial, very much in the fashion of its time and quite unlike his later work. The young Constance lay posed on what appeared to be a bier, draped in heavy white material, perhaps satin. Only her hands, which clasped a flower, and her head were visible; the rest of her body was wrapped and draped as if in a shroud. Her black hair, long